


A Thing you Are

by Hedgi



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: AU where Superman isn't quite as much of a jerk, Gen, Souls, character piece, sorta introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-11
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-20 04:40:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4773890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hedgi/pseuds/Hedgi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He knows how to read and write, and he knows the names of things, but there are some things, some questions, unknown and unanswered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Thing you Are

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KennaM](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KennaM/gifts).



The G-gnomes taught him a lot.

So, ok, maybe not a lot of minor things, like the plots of the books the others left around, or what “Star Wars” was, or what chocolate tasted like. But he knew the important things.   
He knew what the world looked like, and quite a lot about how it worked, and how to read, and write.  He knew the names of things, if not the nicknames and slang terms, and how to boil an egg, ride a bicycle—in theory--, and start three types of campfires. He could solve a math problem, recite a bunch of poems by old dead people, and find any major country on a map of the world.  
He knew that a month had 30 days, or 31, except for February, which only had 28, because two emperors had months named after them and those needed 31 days each, which they stole from February, and threw off the whole pattern. He knew that salmon swam upstream to find, by instinct, the place where they were born.  
 He knew that trees took in carbon dioxide and released oxygen, which humans needed to survive. He knew that humans could go up to two months without food, around a week without water or sleep, but only minutes without air. He knew that humans had stories about the stars, and the oceans, and the weather, stories to explain everything they didn’t understand and the things they did understand, but didn’t want to.   
He knew that he was not human.

* * *

  
He didn’t have a lot. Some clothes, because his tattered white suit was, well, tattered, and Batman had insisted. Kid Flash—Wally— and Robin, out of uniform and apparently just called “Rob” took him to the store. Superman didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t. Superboy told himself he didn’t care. He did.  
The others added things to his room—he had a room with a little window set into the ceiling, that was actually just a screen that played security footage of outside, so it was good enough. He could see the sunrise in it.   
He didn’t have much, but Black Canary brought him a rug for the floor, soft and dark blue like the sky the first time he’d seen it. It felt good under bare feet. Rob and Wally brought him books from home, which he stacked neatly on the shelf and thumbed through. Stories about boy wizards who didn’t have parents, and teenagers bitten by spiders who didn’t have parents, and children of Greco-roman deities who _did_ have parents but might as well not have.  
He didn’t care for the books and comics much, but they were _his._  
He had a lot of things, really, more than he’d had in the pod. A bed. Shoes and socks and shirts that were dark, not bright white like the only color (hue) he’d remembered from Before. The books and rug and a poster on the wall for a band called the Leather Spoons, all his. He knew that lots of people, according to the information in his head, didn’t have even one pair of shoes. Or a room of their own. Or books.  
He should be happy for these things. It shouldn’t matter what he didn’t have, because that was greedy, and selfish, and he was supposed to be like Superman  
But he didn’t have a belly button, or a family, or a name.  
Somehow those things seemed more important than books.

* * *

 

M’gann gave him a name. Conner. Connor was the name of an Irish king in the old mythologies, only spelled with a bunch of extra letters. The G-gnomes hadn’t really explained that, but he thought it had something to do with history and merging languages.  
Connor the King only got the title because of his mother. Conner the clone didn’t have one of those. Maybe that was for the best. Being king didn’t help the Irish Connor much. He wasn’t happy. He couldn’t even fight to protect his people sometimes.  
According to the research he did, Connor also meant “Wolf Lover.”  
That was good. He liked wolves. Animals were nicer. They didn’t lie.  
They didn’t smile distantly because they were supposed to, and then pretend you didn’t exist and talk about you as if you couldn’t hear them.  
And wolves were Pack animals. Family meant everything.  
Conner the clone didn’t have a country that looked to him for help. Not even a city. There was already a Superman.  
But he had a team. They were enough. They cared about him, even. Not just that he could fight for them. Or that they thought they had to. They really did care. They had his back.  
They were Pack.

* * *

 

Still, it was a long time before he asked questions, the things that the G-gnomes hadn’t told him. People assumed he knew everything he needed to, so he let them. If he wasn’t good enough, if he didn’t know enough, maybe they’d think he was cheating them. Already he couldn’t fly, or use heat ray vision, like he was supposed to. He was a screw-up. He didn’t want the others to know how much of one he was. Wally, and M’gann, and Rob, and Kaldur, even Artemis, they seemed like maybe they wouldn’t mind. But how could he tell Batman he didn’t know something, or Canary, or Tornado?  
Much less Superman.  
Maybe Superman already knew.  
So he did his best. He used the library—M’gann said libraries were for nerds, but then added that she didn’t see why that was bad, and Rob helped him get a library card. He looked up questions scribbled in notebooks, things he overheard and didn’t know.  
There were so many things.  
There was only so much research he could do. Some things didn’t have answers, but he needed them.  
He could look up why the sky was blue, except he already knew that—but that was the kind of thing he could look up.  
He couldn’t just google things like when the universe started, and what was before that, and how could nothing come from nothing—there had to have been something to start with and where did that come from? He didn’t want to ask. Maybe it was stupid. Maybe it was something people just understood.   
Maybe it didn’t matter. It really didn’t, he told himself. It was a long time ago. It won’t change Now, knowing about Way back Then.  
History _re_ peats, but only when there’s history to _peat_ in the first place.   
He asked one of the wondering questions to Canary once, about, ages, and how he was only a couple months, but he was a teenager, and M’gann was 40, but still only a teenager, and Wally ran so fast that Time was almost different but he was still a teenager too, and how did that work? Why were there these arbitrary divides, as if one overnight from 17 to 18 suddenly meant you were smarter or stronger or knew more? She’d asked what he thought about it instead of just telling him.  
He shrugged. Left. She probably thought it was dumb.  


* * *

  
He didn’t ask the questions much. He didn’t want people to laugh. No one laughed at Superman. But some things just nagged at him and wouldn’t leave him alone.  
He asked Wally, first. Wally was the kind who laughed but not meanly.

“What’s a soul?”

“Something people think people have.” And he went off talking about science and how some things couldn’t be proved.   
He decided to ask someone else, but M’gann had shrugged. “It’s like a…a thing. The poem for English says Hope’s there like a bird.  I don’t know.”

“Something you’re born with, I guess. They say they’re immortal, but I dunno. Maybe they aren’t even real,” Artemis had said. “I never thought about it. What does it matter?”

“It’s what makes someone a person.” Kaldur said. “Your spirit. Your heart and mind, together.”

Conner didn’t know if that made sense. His mind wasn’t his, it was created. Shaped. The same with his heart. And he wasn’t born. Not really.

  
Rob said he didn’t know about Kryptonians, and Conner thought that was a polite way of saying he didn’t know about Clones

He wanted to ask Canary, maybe.  
But then they were busy. He had to shove the question away to concentrate on the Mission.

It went like the others. Ok. They saved some kids, and they smiled at him, and they saved an old lady and her tiny hamster-sized dog-thing, and they stopped the bombing attempts. It wasn’t part of the Light, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t important to stop.  
Still, the fight over, he had to know, now, before he lost his nerve.

Superman wouldn’t be scared to ask.

But he wasn’t Superman.

 

* * *

 

“Do I have a soul?” he asked it fast and hard and didn’t even look up to see who he’d asked.  
He probably should have. The strong, steady heartbeat and other sounds—breathing, shifting gravel under larger feet, had told him it was one of the grown ups. He didn’t expect it to be Superman.  
  
But he’d asked and he couldn’t leave or waver now, that was weak, that was like he was ashamed and he wasn’t. He wanted an answer. He held his breath and waited.

“No.”

“Oh.” That was it, then. He hadn’t expected the answer to hurt like it did. It shouldn’t have hurt, he thought. But it did. He turned away, but there was a hand on his shoulder, calloused and firm.

“Wait, no, that’s not—“ If Superman had been the type to curse, Conner thought he would have. “It’s a—a quote, a thing that my teacher used to say. ‘you don’t have a soul, you are a soul’ or…something.”

Superman let go, rubbed the back of his neck.

He breathed again. Superman did the same. The silence stretched, long after so much noise.

“It’s just a saying. That’s all, that—a soul isn’t what you have, it’s what you are, the part of you that’s you. Everyone’s a soul, see?”

Conner thought he almost looked ashamed.

“Even me?”

The shame look went deeper, not just a mask but a flood. Conner had never seen Superman’s shoulders slump like that.

“I—yeah. Listen,” Conner nodded, knowing this moment was over, there wouldn’t be another. Superman had made that clear as glass the first time they’d spoken. “There are some people I think would want to meet you.”

The G-gnomes had taught him a lot. But Conner had learned more from standing under the dark sky, from the musty books in the library, from eating M’gann’s cookies and reading Rob’s books, and from people. So he nodded again.

“Ok.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be just the last section, but everything I touch turns to angst or introspective angst, or both. so. *throws confetti*


End file.
